The proposed research concerns the relationship between personal control, on the one hand, and stress, coping, and emotion, on the other. By "personal control" is meant the ability to influence the course of a potentially threatening event, either through the receipt of information or by direct behavioral intervention. Underlying the present proposal is the assumption that stress and coping may occur semi-independently, each being responsive to its own set of adaptive demands. One objective of the proposed research is thus to determine the conditions under which personal control leads to reduced stress, and under what conditions it hasthe opposite (stress-inducing) effect. Emotions are here viewed as institutionaized forms of coping. They differ from instrumental coping responses in that the attribution of emotion typically involves a denial of responsibility for the consequences of an act. A second objective of the proposed research is, then, to explore the social and personal factors which lead to the interpretation of a coping response as emotional. To pursue the above objectives, four general types of studies are proposed. The first concerns the interaction between informational and behavioral modes of control, and their influence on psychophysiological stress reactions. The second involves a program of experimental research on the self-attribution of emotion. The third entails the multidimensional scaling of everyday emotional concepts. And, finally, the fourth area of research involves the detailed examination of one particular emotion, namely, anger.